THE FBI's SPIN CYCLE

By: Alicia Mundy Pack Rat: Washington Press Corps Fell Silent On Hanssen


Silence in Washington can be very loud. Trees fall in forests, and nobody hears them. That apparently happened at the FBI during the years that its counterespionage agent Robert Hanssen was secretly spying for the Russians. And it's apparently happening again, among many Washington journalists covering the Hanssen debacle.

Hanssen's treachery was certainly shocking. But the FBI has taken the position that there were no - repeat, no - signs that Hanssen had problems. Interestingly, most of the regular reporters who cover the agency, including some who have produced books about it, have allowed the FBI a lot of slack here, letting agency spin guide the story lines.

But there are some very hard questions that are simply not being asked of the FBI, and the agency is getting off the hook too easily. I worked as a defense analyst in the early 1980s and had security clearances. I remember being told during one interview that the government knew that some people feigned "superpatriot" status to cover their extracurricular activities.
Hanssen's seemingly constant concern with "godless communism" in the post-Soviet era should have tipped off some smart FBI official somewhere that this guy was way too invested in his own image.

There's an even more appalling mistake. The Washington Post reported in February that Hanssen - this conservative Catholic, family-values American - actually struck and knocked down a female FBI employee in 1993. Kimberly Lichtenberg had the temerity to disagree with Hanssen during a meeting and left the room. He chased her down the corridor, knocked her to the floor, and then tried to drag her back in, bruising her. He was suspended five days without pay. Hello? Name another job where you can treat a female employee like that and not be fired or face charges. This guy was doing high-level security work for us?

Sexism should have been an early clue in the Aldrich Ames case. A female CIA agent complained to supervisors that Ames was using the New York safe house to shack up with his girlfriend (who later became part of his well-financed web). The agent was told to ignore it - it was a guy thing, and Ames was one of the guys.

This kind of male-female disconnect in evaluating behavior among agents has been a problem with both the FBI and the CIA in recent years - the good old boys come together to protect their own. That's why so many female FBI and CIA employees continue filing lawsuit after lawsuit.

The Lichtenberg incident could have been a major signal that Hanssen was too tightly wound, that his church-inspired family values did not extend to simple control of his behavior in the office. If Hanssen were, say, a corporate executive, or an official with the Republican National Committee, you'd be hearing a lot from reporters, politicians, etc.,
asking why a physically abusive misogynist in the workplace was allowed to stay in such an important job. However, the FBI is not getting called to account here.

It's one of the ingrained problems with Washington journalism. To cover certain agencies - such as the FBI, the CIA, the Food and Drug Administration - the reporter has to go with the flow. Write a bad story, buck the spin, and you're shut out. It's been particularly so with the FBI under Director Louis Freeh. He's a good man and certainly an improvement over his predecessor. But he's spent a lot of time positioning himself as Mr. Clean, making sure that the press reports any arguments he ever had with former Attorney General Janet Reno or with CIA officials, so we can all admire his foresight and integrity.

Though there have been excellent pieces on Hanssen in The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report, there hasn't been much use of "alternative" sources to raise obvious questions about how the FBI messed up.

One of the few outside voices has been Ron Kessler, who wrote a book about the FBI - and in an Op-Ed piece called for Freeh's firing because, among other things, the FBI didn't bother to polygraph its own agents. A well-respected intelligence writer told me that the incident with Lichtenberg, as he was informed by FBI sources, wasn't quite black and white.

Is that true - or spin from the FBI?

Whatever else happened, Hanssen hit a female subordinate, and there was enough evidence to make a permanent mark on his record, unacceptable behavior in most white-collar jobs.

The willingness to tolerate any behavior as long as the perpetrator espouses a hatred of godless communism got the United States into trouble in a lot of places - Latin America, Southeast Asia. That we didn't learn enough to examine the inconsistency between someone's public posturing and their treatment of fellow citizens and subordinates is terrible.

That the Washington press corps isn't asking "Why?" is what's frightening.



Alicia Mundy's "Pack Rat" column appears monthly in E&P. Mundy (Mundy007@aol.com) is Washington bureau chief for Mediaweek, a sister magazine.



Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher.